Paul Tessier

Paul Tessier (August 1917 to 6 June 2008) was a French maxillofacial surgeon and one of the founders of plastic surgery, widely considered the father of modern craniofacial surgery. Born in Héric, Loire-Atlantique, he trained at the medical school in Nantes and took his Doctor of Medicine degree from the Paris faculty in 1943. During his internship in 1942 he began operating on patients with cleft lip, cleft palate and Dupuytren's contracture, and from 1944 he worked in pediatric surgery in Paris and then at the maxillofacial surgery center of the Paris military region. From the mid 1950s he set about improving techniques for correcting craniofacial deformities and performed his first craniofacial operation in 1967. Over the 1960s and 1970s he developed the use of the patient's own bone grafts in place of silicone or acrylic to reshape the skull and face, transcranial and subcranial correction of orbital hypertelorism, techniques for Treacher Collins syndrome and the correction of craniofacial clefts. He demonstrated these methods in the United States from the 1970s, and they are now used in plastic and maxillofacial surgery as well as trauma and neurosurgery. He was a founding member of the International Society of Craniofacial Surgery and the European Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons, and received the Jacobson Innovation Award in 2000.